HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY (1981)

My limited acquaintance with the work of Lucio Fulci has been a mixed experience. I love Zombie (aka Zombi 2, Zombie Flesh Eaters, etc) for its straightforward luridness and one of the most awesome moments in all cinema, the underwater battle between a zombie and a shark. But I took a look at The Beyond back when it had a run in the art houses about a decade ago, and my response was somewhere between "Huh?" and "So?" The dead rising to eat people I could deal with, but the other film somehow didn't make sense. So is it me, or is it Fulci? The rubber match is his haunted house/mad doctor gorefest, which I watched on a cheapo DVD that presumably reproduces the version first seen by American audiences. Better versions exist, but I found this in a bargain bin at a price which, given that the film was at least letterboxed, I couldn't resist at this time of year.

It's a film of its time, which is to say long enough after The Shining came out to reflect its influence. The influence is most obvious in a little boy's ability to communicate with a little girl in an old photograph. The girl is warning Bob not to move in to a particular house in New Whitby, Massachusetts, where Bob's dad is going to do research, but where the previous occupant killed himself after apparently slaughtering his own family. Before the credits, the abandoned house serves as a passion pit/deathtrap for the archetypal horny teens, one of whom gets a big knife thrust through her skull so the point comes out of her open mouth. She's dragged away by a mostly unseen entity.

The little girl who lives in the photograph comes to life in House By the Cemetery.

Bob's dad begins to piece together the story of Dr. Jacob Freudstein (that's "freud-steen."), an even earlier tenant who was buried in the basement according to a crypt marker the family finds. Bob himself learns more from the little girl in the picture, who looks very much alive to him once he reaches New Whitby. She shows him the grave of a Mrs. Freudstein (still "freud-steen.") but divulges that she "isn't very dead." Meanwhile, a realtor and a briefly -suspicious maid learn that there's still a menace in the basement, and it likes to cut throats, repeatedly, before dragging the bodies away.

The thing in the House by the Cemetery is pretty sloppy, leaving behind great streaks of blood for the maid to clean up, then killing the maid and leaving whole pieces of her behind.

Fulci takes an old-school approach with this menace, keeping it mostly out of view for most of the picture to build up anticipation of the big reveal. The fact that it's a single menace rather than an army of monsters is also rather retro for this director. Leave the gore out of it and it's a pretty conventional horror film. But you can't leave the gore out because that's the point of Fulci's films, or at least those I've seen. He's interested in creating a particular kind of fear. If older horror provoked empathy for victims in peril or a sympathetic dread that you might experience a similar fate, Fulci dares you to witness atrocities. This is a perfectly legitimate approach to horror, and not to be dismissed as a cheap sensationalist substitute for classic horror's power of suggestion. But here the gore scenes seem secondary, part of the buildup for the ultimate reveal of Dr. Freudstein ("freud-steen," remember.) in the basement.

As the story's been pieced together, the good doctor has been in the house for more than a century, keeping himself alive by blasphemous means and from appearances doing not a great job of it. He kills people and somehow uses them to revitalize his cells, but it looks like more than that is going on. The reveal is worth the wait as we see one sick creature, its face worn away to near blankness, slow moving but equipped with a powerful claw-like right hand that can rip a man's throat out when knives aren't handy. He grunts rather than talks but seems to be able to imitate crying children. Stab him and he bleeds maggots. His mere existence is an atrocity. Freudstein is one of the most repellent movie monsters I've ever seen.

But there must be more to the house by the cemetery than Freudstein's experiments and crimes. It turns out that the girl who befriended Bob is Freudstein's daughter from the 19th century, who with her mother somehow escaped their monstrous breadwinner by entering into (I guess) another dimension where Bob himself takes shelter at the end of the movie. So did the presence of such a bend in reality perhaps drive the doctor mad or is it just there for the sake of adding another weird element to a film that'd be quite weird enough without it, thank you? Since there often is no "why" in European horror, expect no firm answer from Fulci, but sometimes the absence of a "why" is an intrinsic part of the horror.

Somehow, it hangs together, even if held together more by suggestion, or even inference, than logic. The whole business with the girl and the other dimension is more a matter of poetic license, if I dare say that about an Italian gore film, than a practical dramatic element. House By the Cemetery has the dream-logic of a nightmare, and there isn't really an objective standard for appraising such things. I liked it better than I did The Beyond, but it's nowhere near as much fun as Zombie, but I don't think it was meant to be. I liked it faults and all, but someone not liking it would be perfectly understandable. Whatever its rank in the Fulci filmography, I'd risk recommending it to people looking for a creepy and nasty movie for the Halloween season.

Khadafi96 uploaded the English language trailer.

TWO MEN IN TOWN (Deux Hommes Dans la Ville, 1973)

Jose Giovanni was a major figure in French crime literature and crime movies. A former death-row inmate, he became a writer whose novels inspired such classics as Claude Sautet's Classe Tous Risques and Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Deuxieme Souffle. Eventually Giovanni wrote and directed his own movies; I reviewed one of them, Le Gitan, earlier this year. Like that one, Deux Hommes Dans la Ville features Alain Delon, who produced the film. Unlike Le Gitan, Two Men In Town (known in England as Two Against the Law and in one Spanish speaking country as Two Against the City) is an impassioned act of rebellion against the crime genre if not against the entire concept of the "criminal" as a personality type.

Producer Delon plays the main character but generously cedes top billing to then-living legend Jean Gabin. At age 69, Gabin was near the end of his run, and his elderly, authoritative presence is equivalent to Jimmy Stewart, say, playing a similar role in an American film of the period. Often a tough guy in his own vehicles (I've seen too few of them), Gabin this time out is Gervaise Cazeneuve, a kind of guidance counselor to prisoners awaiting parole, and a mentor in particular to Gino Strabliggi (Delon), who's served ten years for robbery as the picture opens. Gervaise pleads hard for Gino's release against skeptical authorities who see him as nothing but a career criminal. From the first, viewers familiar with crime movies will anticipate where the story goes.

As a parolee, Gino is barred by French law from living in major cities or port towns. Gervaise looks on happily as Gino is reunited with his faithful wife, a florist, and helps his charge find work as a printer. A nearly-familial bond develops between Gino and the entire Cazeneuve brood, including a daughter who has an obvious crush on him. He has the fortitude to resist temptation when some old criminal cronies try to lure him back to the life, and he's serenely unimpressed by the insults hurled by a young punk played by up-and-coming Gerard Depardieu. When the punk sneers that Gino has grown soft, Gino simply says it must be so.

Gerard Depardieu has only one scene with Alain Delon in Two Men in Town, and director Jose Giovanni missed the opportunity to unite three generations of French superstars by having Jean Gabin in the shot.

Both criminals and cops assume that it's only a matter of time before Gino goes bad again, and for a while after his wife dies in a car wreck and he sinks into an antisocial funk it looks like he might out of sheer boredom or despair, but his bond with the Cazeneuves keeps him straight until he lands a job in another town and falls in love with Lucie, a half-English bank employee (Mimsy Farmer). He's a good worker whom his boss hopes to make his partner, and this support gives him the confidence to rebuff the crooks yet again when they jump to the conclusion that he's hooked up with Lucie just to get an inside angle on the bank. Sharing their suspicions is Inspector Goitreau (Michel Bouquet), the flic who busted Gino years ago and refuses to believe in his reform. He shadows Gino with increasing determination and tries to undermine the confidence his boss and girlfriend have in him. Finally, when the gang robs the bank themselves, Goitreau is desperate to link Gino to the crime, increasing the pressure on Lucie until Gino snaps at last and beats the flic to death.

Michel Bouquet (top) makes things increasingly difficult for Delon and Mimsy Farmer (below)

That was no spoiler because the ultimate drama of Deux Hommes is whether Gino, who has clearly done wrong but was clearly provoked beyond reason by a mean-spirited cop, will get the death penalty. This is an issue of obvious interest to a writer who did time on death row himself, and the whole film is an indictment of the French criminal-justice system. In his view, the fact that France still used the guillotine in the 1970s betrayed the nation's claim to be a world cultural leader. As Gabin says at the end of the film, the entire system is a killing machine, and a big part of that fatal system is the merciless categorization of people who had bad breaks and made mistakes as "criminals" who are exiled from much of life and condemned to perpetual suspicion as if they're all vicious by nature. I wonder whether Deux Hommes was in some way a mea culpa for Giovanni, who might have felt that his own earlier writings and the films made from them contributed to the idea of a criminal archetype that obscured the humanity of real people who happened to commit crimes. The film makes an interesting counterpoint to Straight Time, a film made from a novel by an American ex-con who seems to embrace the idea of a criminal as a certain character type with a particular moral code and lifestyle. You might ask whether the main character in each film is meant to be exceptional or typical, and it might be a weakness of Giovanni's film that you're not sure of the answer as far as Gino's concerned. He seems almost too good to be true until the cop wrecks his life (and the flic himself isn't much more than a caricature), but Giovanni may have thought that in this case the exception disproved the criminal stereotype that he opposed.

Two Men in Town may be a critique of Giovanni's own work, but it also seems at times like a riff on some themes in American crime films of the 1930s. The idea that society, if it didn't make Gino a criminal in the first place, remade him as a criminal through a self-fulfilling prophecy, has a familiar ring to an American ear. The final scene reminded me of the death-house climax of Angels With Dirty Faces. In that film, the lingering question is whether Cagney feigned fear to give the Dead End Kids an anti-role model of criminal cowardice, or whether his fear was unfeigned because he really was a cowardly criminal. Giovanni and Delon predictably dispense with the Hollywood histrionics, but the writer-director makes a point of having Delon state simply to Gabin, "I'm scared." The point isn't to prove something about the criminal mind, but to remind us one more time that Gino Strabliggi is a human being. It's a tribute to Delon's commitment to the project that he sells the fear and vulnerability with understatement. As an actor, he's contributed to the criminal archetype with numerous too-cool badass performances, and he'd give another for Giovanni in Le Gitan, but here he has to transcend the archetype, and he does. As for Gabin, his job is to narrate, act as a surrogate father-figure for Delon, and express the auteur's bruised, despairing idealism. It must have been something for French audiences to see him do it, but others probably need a crash course in Jean Gabin to get it.

Deux Hommes is a genre-defying film. People who watch it expecting something like a Melville film could easily be disappointed, but the director and the cast should make it an item of automatic interest for French crime fans, who'll at least go away with food for thought.

Here's the French trailer, uploaded by Annie7676. There's no English translation, and there wasn't any on the Kino DVD either. You do get a chance to hear some of the great, mournful score by Philippe Sarde.

THE GAMBLER (1974)

Here's a movie I remember vividly from my childhood in the 1970s, though not for having seen it (it was rated R, after all) but from an indelible ad campaign that focused on the image of James Caan standing over a black jack table, his head transfigured in the radiant beams of an overhead light, a scene that proves even more powerful in the film itself as Jerry Fielding's Mahler-esque music plays over a moment of implausible triumph for Caan's seemingly doomed title character. I'm just getting around to seeing Karel Reisz's movie because the Albany Public Library acquired the DVD. In a way, it's as much of a horror film as some of the others I've looked at this month, but it's a matter of moral horror rather than outright fright.

James Caan gambles with fate as Lauren Hutton looks on in The Gambler

Caan plays Axel Freed, grandson of a furniture store magnate, son of a doctor (his mother, that is) and a professor of literature in a New York university. It reads like the genealogy of the American dream, but Axel is driven by personal demons to risk ruin through compulsive gambling. As the film opens, he's in debt and sinking deeper at an illicit casino run by Hips (Paul Sorvino). He's humiliated by having to ask his mother for the money to pay off his debts, and there's an unspoken dissatisfaction with his own profession compared with the grandpa he idolizes, an old lion he toasts at an 80th-birthday party as "this killer, this king." As a professor, Axel is neither, but as a gambler he comes closer, so he seems to think, to the manly ideal. He only makes $1,500 a month at the school, and the gambling is in part an attempt to achieve autonomy. Having gotten the money he needs from his mom to pay his debts, he abruptly decides to wager it all on college football after grandpa advises him to dump his girlfriend Billie (Lauren Hutton). Why should he dump her? Because grandpa says she's the type for a "playboy," not for a scholar, or for that matter a Jew. But Axel can't deny either side of himself, and gambling is his self-destructive form of self-realization. "If my money's gonna blow," he says, "I'm gonna be the one that does the blowing."

Family ties: Cann toasts Morris Carnovsky (above) and takes his lumps from
Jacqueline Brooks (below)

James Woods won't authorize a withdrawl because Brooks, a doctor, only carries one form of I.D. in 1974. Caan tries to make him see reason (below).

Not waiting to learn how the games turn out, he takes Billie to Las Vegas, where he has an incredible run of luck culminating in the godlike moment when he seemingly wills the dealer to give him a three to make twenty-one. But in Vegas he seems far from a compulsive character. He never stays at one table or one casino for long, and he always quits while he's ahead. It's as if once he achieves that feeling of power that comes from winning, he doesn't need the rush of risk, or what he later describes as "juice," for at least awhile. It's a good thing, too, since all three teams he picked lose. That would have wiped him out if not for his Vegas winnings, but losing half drives him to bet the rest on a single basketball game, with disastrous consequences. Now dangerously in debt to unsavory forces, he's pressured to lure one of his students into a point-shaving scheme on which Axel's own life depends.

So why does Axel gamble? If anything, James Toback's script tries too hard to explain it or make what's irrational rational in psychological terms. Family issues are clearly a factor, but as Axel tells Billie, "I like the uncertainty of it. I like the threat of losing. I like the idea that I could lose, but that somehow I won't because I don't want to." Accepting risk is an act of will or will to power. Teaching Dostoevsky, he defines will as the power to decide that two and two make five. Teaching William Carlos Williams, he uses the poet's critique of George Washington to show that avoiding risk is contemptible. As he tells Hips, gamblers have to be willing to lose; "If all my bets were safe there just wouldn't be any juice." Hips himself never gambles, since he understands, as Axel does, that the worst gamblers are "all looking to lose." But there's a manhood thing to it as well, which another bookie confirms when he tells Axel, "I've seen nuts before, but you've got watermelons." Finally, there's a self-destructive urge tied to an obvious guilt he feels (whether justified or not) at not living up to his grandfather or mother's achievements. This thread is taken up in a strange closing act in which he enters the ghetto, feeling guilty over corrupting his student, picks up a prostitute, then picks a fight with her pimp (the inevitable Antonio Fargas). He emerges with his face disfigured, as he knew might have happened if he hadn't paid back his creditors, but he gazes on the fresh, flowing scar as if it's a kind of badge of honor, or the mark that will identify what he is once and for all to people who think him or want him to be something else.

Director Reisz actually freeze-frames on this moment to intensify the instant of Caan's wounding.

Whether you're convinced by these explanations or not, you're more likely to be persuaded by James Caan's powerhouse performance. He expresses Axel's complexity more effectively than the script can explain it, and he has a strong supporting cast to play against, including Morris Carnovsky as the grandfather, Jacqueline Brooks as the mother, and Burt Young, Vic Tayback, M. Emmet Walsh and a quite young James Woods in smaller roles. In other words, it's a rich cast strongly directed by Reisz, but it's Caan's show all the way, and a harsh portrayal of a man for whom self-abnegation is an act of monstrous ego. It tells you about the depth of quality in Seventies cinema that The Gambler got no Oscar nominations (though Caan was nominated for a Golden Globe). But don't let that official neglect lead you to ignore this film.

BLACK MOON (1934)

Roy William Neill's voodoo-rama turned up again this week on TCM, so in the spirit of the month I decided to take a look. I remember reading an article about this movie in Films in Review magazine years ago and had been interested in it ever since. It pretty much lived up to expectations. Neill stages things quite nicely, uses props in the foreground to keep his sets well dressed, and the sets themselves are well designed so he can employ swish pans or move from one level to another. He did equally good work the following year in The Black Room, which boasts Boris Karloff in a dual role, and both these Columbia horrors strike me as better films than his contribution to the Universal mythos, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man.

In bare outline, Black Moon anticipates I Walked With A Zombie in making the heroine an aide to a troubled woman under the spell of the Caribbean. But the Columbia film distinguishes itself by making its bewitched female an outright villain. She's Juanita Lane (Dorothy Burgess), who fell under the influence of voodoo when young and has never quite shaken it. The film opens with her playing ominous drums for the supposed entertainment of her young daughter, who'll be set up for her own initiation into voodoo later, or worse. Gail Hamilton (Fay Wray) reluctantly comes along to look after Juanita's daughter and increasingly becomes a surrogate mother figure, especially as she warms to Juanita's estranged husband Stephen (top-billed Jack Holt). The natives of the island of St. Christopher welcome Juanita back, but regard the other whites with suspicion. The only black ally Stephen Lane may have is "Lunch" McClaren (Clarence Muse), a Georgia-born boat captain who feels as superior to the native "monkey chasers" as the whites might. But he ends up stranded on the island with the Lane party as the local voodoo cult re-establishes ties with Juanita, who has an important role to play in an upcoming human sacrifice.

In fact, Juanita's sudden appearance in voodoo garb to perform a dance to the dark gods is a startling moment that drives home how far gone she is. Stephen and Lunch try to abort the sacrifice, the victim being Lunch's native girlfriend, but after Stephen plugs the high priest and both men flee, Juanita herself takes up the sword to finish the bloody work. While the priest is only wounded, it seems like the balance of power is shifting toward Juanita, who leads a siege of the Lane compound with the thought of sacrificing her own husband. But when the good guys manage to escape, the pressure's on Juanita to sacrifice one of her own blood -- her own daughter.

Black Moon is a horror movie that doesn't quite look like a horror film. Unlike The Black Room, this film from Neil does without the usual expressionistic effects or gothic tone we associate with vintage horror. Despite its bigotedly distorted view of voodoo, it aims for a more realistic visual and storytelling style than, say, White Zombie -- the film that most likely inspired Black Moon's production. By Universal standards, Dorothy Burgess probably looks like an underwhelming villain because, apart from the dance, she tends to underplay her part, as if selling that she's in a trancelike state throughout. But she ends up being one of the most troubling characters in pre-Code horror because she gets a moment when motherhood must vie with voodoo for her ultimate loyalty -- and motherhood loses. Skip the next paragraph to avoid a spoiler.

As Black Moon reaches its climax, I was expecting motherhood to win out, which given the situation would mean that the already irredeemable Juanita, having already murdered at least one person, would kill herself rather than sacrifice her daughter. But the spell of voodoo proves too strong, leaving Stephen only one way to save the child -- by killing his own wife. The script could actually have done more to sell how awful a moment this should have been for Stephen, but the writers had little more than an hour to fill, and I don't know if Jack Holt was enough of an actor to sell it. But the thought of how this all plays out is pretty chilling.

Strange to say, but Fay Wray is actually disappointing here; I don't recall whether she screams or not in the picture, but she's never really in individual peril, and that seems like a waste. If you have her in a horror flick it should be her facing sacrifice, but instead she's rather like a spare tire. You know she's going to take Juanita's place in the Lane family, but she has no chemistry with Holt and doesn't have enough conflict with Burgess to earn her second billing. On the other hand, Clarence Muse was a pleasant surprise as Lunch. He had a brief role as a dignified coachman in White Zombie, but here gets one of the more fleshed-out roles for a black actor in this period. Lunch is his own master and as an American is not in thrall to voodoo like the natives, though he rightly fears the pure evil of this film's concept of it. He speaks freely to white folks (though he shuts up when told to) and doesn't chicken out during the siege. Instead, announcing that "The time has come!" he takes a gun and fights alongside Stephen and the local doctor, and his shooting is just as effective as theirs. He's indisputably one of the heroes of the movie.

This isn't the first time I've seen a Columbia programmer on TCM and been impressed by it. It helps a lot that Black Moon looks terrific in a practically pristine print that flatters Joseph August's cinematography. August would go on to great things at RKO, and he really helps this film punch above its weight. Columbia was supposed to be close to Poverty Row in these years, apart from Frank Capra's films, but on the strength of Neill's movies it looks like they treated their experiments in horror as A productions -- or at least they look that way. It deserves a more prominent place in the Thirties horror canon.

THE SPHINX (1933)

A janitor thinks he's by himself in an office building after hours when through a door steps Lionel Atwill, one of the leading horror men of the early 1930s, but the janitor doesn't know that. He's just a fictional character and wants to know what the stranger is doing in a closed building. The stranger doesn't answer, but asks for a light and the proper time before leaving. He's left a door open and there's a light on in the office of Mr. Garfield, a stockbroker. The janitor goes inside and finds Mr. Garfield, a corpse. He takes a stiff drink and calls the cops.

As the cops converge, reporter Jack Burton arrives on the scene. He's a typical B-movie reporter hero, i.e. a big smartass with little or no respect for the police. How did you know this was a murder, one flatfoot inquires. "Easy," Burton answers, "I made a quick check-up of the population of the city and found out we were one short."

"Yeah, but if you don't get out of here we're gonna be two short." the copper retorts. But Burton manages to bulldoze his way into the dead man's office and openly mocks the lead inspector. "You know I always tag along on all your unsolved murders," he says, "I just thought I'd come along and see you didn't break the record." But he also has an insight.

"Has the fact taken residence in your cranium that Garfield was a stockbroker?" he asks, "And that the other three victims of the recent murder cases were also stockbrokers?" So why not investigate clients of the dead brokers?

"If we're going to suspect everybody in this country who's sore on stockbrokers, we're gonna be getting out indictments for half the population of the United States." Detective Terrence Aloysius Hogan answers.

Theodore Newton (left, on loan from Warner Bros.) plays Jack Burton the reporter, while Paul Hurst portrays the vaguely Fieldsian Detective Hogan.

Welcome to 1933 and the relentless irreverence of Depression-era B movies. The Sphinx isn't an all-out pre-Code spectacle by the standard of 21st century expectations, since there isn't much sexual content or subtext. But Albert DeMond's insolent script and that crack about stockbrokers mark it as a product of its time, something we might not have seen or heard just a few years later.

I was watching it for Lionel Atwill, hoping it would be more of a "Forgotten Horror" than it proved to be. The Sphinx seems like it was meant as an acting challenge for Atwill that actually comes closer to wasting his skills. Here's how: that janitor gives a description of the stranger and presumed murderer that matches one Jerome Breen, an eminent philanthropist who's promptly arrested. But there's a big hole in the case against Breen. The janitor (and the viewer) distinctly recalls the stranger speaking to him, but Breen has been mute since birth due to defective vocal chords. An independent medical exam by the prosecution confirms this, and Breen is acquitted after a trial that humiliates both the police and Burton, who had publicized Breen as the killer. It also humiliates Burton in front of his girlfriend, society reporter Jerry Crane (Sheila Terry), who develops a soft spot for Breen and decides to write his life story. So Atwill has to play mute as the "sphinx" of the title. He learned some sign language, or faked some, but otherwise depended on his eyes and a kind of glazed smile to create an image of dull benevolence. But that guy we saw talking to the janitor in the office building was clearly Lionel Atwill. So what's up?

Things get more suspicious after a stockbroker's clerk starts playing a double game, blackmailing Breen while angling for a $5,000 reward offered by Burton's paper. He has Breen over to his mother's house to negotiate, and the good man makes his mute greeting to the old woman before going upstairs. Upon coming downstairs again, he vocally asks her for the correct time. This simple request sends the poor crone into a swoon. This is a kind of testament that Atwill's menace really does come largely from his voice, which the story has barely allowed him to use. But in any event, the situation has repeated itself. The would-be blackmailer has been strangled, but the killer can't be Breen, despite appearances, because he spoke to someone.

Actually, only one solution is possible for this puzzle, as some of you have probably figured out already. I'll preserve the mystery for the rest of you and reserve my criticism for an especially dumb plot device from later in the film. Needless to say, Burton and the cops are back breathing down Breen's neck after the latest murder, but he remains unperturbed, even when Hogan fires a gun in an effort to prove that Breen isn't really deaf. Moments later, however, Breen appears startled when Burton plays some idle high notes on his piano. Why does a deaf guy have a piano? As Breen's interpreter explains, it's there for the entertainment of his guests. But we later learn that the final key on the board activates a secret passage in a nearby wall. Breen hadn't actually heard Burton play, but was worried that he would hit the crucial key and open the passage. There'll be more suspense later in the picture as different people play that piano, until any rational mind must ask: if you have a secret passage in your house, and you don't want strangers opening it, why on earth do you wire the entrance up to a piano that you've put there for the entertainment of your guests???

Atwill shows what he thinks of my critique of the whole piano business.

So let's face it: The Sphinx is a dumb movie, but I can't help liking it for its hard-boiled irreverence and wiseass ball-busting patter, for lines like, "Say, Sherlock, I can write all you found out on a postage stamp and still have room on it to do a jigsaw puzzle;" or "As for what he was wearing, he was just wearing on everyone;" or "I don't know what this country's coming to when a guy can't get a drink in a police station." You might laugh or you might groan, but you've got to love a world where people talk like that -- except for poor Atwill, most of the time. You could do worse with an hour or so of your time.

Now, for a limited time, The Sphinx comes with bonus Lionel Atwill!

THE VELVET VAMPIRE (1971)

Stephanie Rothman's film is an intriguing, titillating mix of old horror motifs and some that were new or just particular to her time. In the early 1970s the desert was probably a spookier place for many viewers than it might be today. That's because it was Manson Country, and there are other Manson signifiers in the background, such as the dune buggy the title menace drives through the desert and the ghost town the characters visit -- a stand in for the Spahn Ranch. At the same time, the desert was a visionary landscape for many people, as Zabriskie Point and other films can testify, and it plays that visionary role here as well. But the novelty of the setting doesn't obscure some traditional gothic trappings. The main setting of The Velvet Vampire is pretty basic: a strange house where a guest doesn't know her way around and often loses track of her one companion. But if the film is gothic it is still quite modern -- or Seventies modern -- in its emphasis on sexual anxiety and dysfunction -- and topless actresses.

We start with a husband and wife, Lee and Suzy Ritter, visiting Carl Stoker's art gallery, where they meet Diane Le Fanu, who takes a fancy to the young people and invites them out to her desert home for a weekend. Those last names are just too cute, but that's about as campy as the movie gets, and it plays pretty straight from there. The Ritters' car breaks down in the desert, but Diane arrives in her dune buggy to bring them home while having their car taken to a nearby garage.

The Ritters aren't quite compatible sexually. Lee is more demanding, and there are things that Suzy won't do. There's a scene in their guest bedroom where Lee seems to be requesting oral sex, only to learn that Suzy doesn't feel like it. He goes to sleep in a huff while Diane takes mental notes from the other side of a two-way mirror.

V is for Velvet Vampire, and for Voyeurism.

The bed and the mirror then form part of a desert dreamscape. Here Lee and Suzy make love, only to be interrupted by Diane, who steps through the mirror and summons Lee from the bed. I saw this fullscreen on a streaming video, but even in that diminished state I recognized the quality of the art direction, which must look much better in a proper presentation. But Suzy isn't concerned with aesthetics. She wakes from the dream in an alarmed state, only to learn that Lee has had the same damn dream.

V is also for Visions (above and below)

Suzy likes her stay less and less as Diane openly flirts with her husband ("I'd like to drive your dune buggy," he says significantly; "I'd love to teach you how," she answers). She isn't keen on visiting an abandoned mine, and she gets attacked by a bat for her trouble. When they visit the ghost town, she isn't interested in exploring and decides to sun herself in the middle of the street. For that she gets bit by a snake, but it's Diane who saves the day by eagerly sucking out the poison, and from that point, Suzy starts to warm to the place.

V is for Viper, whatever that may be crawling up Sherry Miles's leg.

There are odd things about Diane. She enjoys steak tartar, which I suppose counts as an acquired taste, but we later see her gobbling raw liver to Lee's disgust. But cats eat raw liver, she says, and aren't we all just animals? Again, an acquired taste, but how about the way she and her servant Juan treated the mechanic who came to the house, and the way they treat the mechanic's girlfriend who shows up at the graveyard snooping around. What's with Juan holding the girl down and Diane biting her neck? And what about Juan telling Suzy that Diane took him in when he was just a child? He and Diane look about the same age, but shouldn't Diane be older? How come her husband's grave has 19th century dates on it? Well, that one Diane can answer: the original dates referred to hubby's grandfather, and since hubby had the same name they just moved him into the old grave when he died. But of course.

But these things aren't bugging Suzy the way they first did. Even the sight of hubby banging their hostess on the living room floor doesn't faze her as much as we might have expected. Suzy actually seems to be turned on by it, and Diane notices this. Something registers in the collective subconscious, too, because the dream of the desert now has a sequel. Previously, Diane had bared her breast to the naked Lee while Suzy pouted in bed. Now, Diane leaves Lee standing in the wind and goes back to the bed. She takes a knife and makes a small cut on Suzy's naked breast, and commences to suckle away. Our waking couple realizes a shift in the balance of power, and Suzy gets a kick out of Lee's swelling jealousy.

The stage is being set for something, since Diane has decided to discharge poor Juan with extreme prejudice. She's going to need, or may just want a new companion, but who's it going to be? She starts to make moves on Suzy: "Have you ever noticed how men envy us?" she asks, "The secret pleasure that only we can have?" Before long, however, she's spread out on a bed inviting Lee to join her. But she'll be back on that bed shortly extending the same invitation to Suzy....

The Velvet Vampire is a low-budget chamber piece for three principal players and a small supporting cast. It's very much a period piece, but doesn't seem as dated as other contemporary horror films. It's simplicity, combined with a little economical surrealism, is all to its advantage, though it stumbles at the end when the story breaks its bounds and extends to a Greyhound bus station and the streets of Los Angeles, where a final chase between vampire and victim plays out like an attempt at guerrilla theater, with a handful of cross-wielding hippies recruited as not very enthusiastic extras. There's also a final twist that'll probably be obvious to everyone as soon as the scene begins, but the film works well enough before the last five minutes to excuse the loss of focus.

And V is for Vigilantes, Vindication and Vengeance.

I wonder whether I feel that the film falters because it doesn't take the expected path of a Seventies vampire film. The Velvet Vampire is almost but not quite a lesbian vampire movie, more of an aggressive tease without any consummation. On one level, the one on which I'm a sexist beast, I was disappointed by that, but the script probably reflects a lingering sexual conservatism that flinches from homosexuality -- or it may simply reflect the fact that director and co-writer Rothman was a woman who considered lesbianism icky. I don't really know anything about her life or career so I can only speculate. In any event her story choices don't disqualify the film, and I'm not sure I wanted a lesbian scene with Sherry Miles, the actress who plays Suzy. She starts out obnoxious, but as the script makes her character more interesting her limits as an actress become even more obvious. She has a deer-in-the-headlights quality that if anything makes it understandable that she recoils from the sexual temptation that more daring actresses embraced around the world in this period. As the Velvet Vampire, Celeste Yarnall more than makes up for Miles's inadequacies, and her enigmatic characterization keeps viewers interested in figuring out exactly what Diane is all about.

So it wasn't quite what I was hoping for in my prurient fashion, but it was pretty good anyway and something that any Seventies horror or vampire cinema fan will find interesting if not just plain entertaining.

Back in the day The Velvet Vampire was part of a double feature, twinned with Scream of the Demon Lover. Bittercinema has uploaded the trailer for that double bill.

Pre-Code Parade: NIGHT NURSE (1931)

"The Things They Know! The Things They See! The Things They Do!...She Sees All! She Knows All! She Tells Nothing!"

The trailer for William Wellman's movie promises an expose of previously unseen areas of society high and low. Part of the expose is the life and routine of the night nurse herself and her training as a probationary nurse. Our test subject is Lora Hart (Barara Stanwyck), who needs the work but lacks the credentials, having dropped out of high school to help support her family. In a sequence that sets the tone for the film, the throat-clearing head nurse rejects Lora flat despite her insistence on her capacity to make good, but on leaving she bumps by accident into the prestigious surgeon Dr. Bell (Charles Winninger), who intervenes personally to get her hired -- without any promise of quid pro quo, by the way. Night Nurse repeatedly opposes the formal system of rules (i.e. "ethics") against spontaneous instinctual goodness that sometimes crosses conventional, ethical and legal lines.

Lora's mentor is Bea Maloney (Joan Blondell), a more hard-bitten girl who shows her the ropes and shares her bed with Lora when a intern stuffs a skeleton into Lora's own bed as a practical joke. You can tell that we're in a "pre-Code" movie because Stanwyck and Blondell take advantage of every opportunity the script offers to strip down to their scanties. But even pre-Code cinema has its limits, and the nurses' relationship is strictly Platonic, at best. Blondell plays a generally sympathetic character, but one who lacks Nora's strong streak of rules-bending morality. Though they end up working for the same client as private-practice nurses, Maloney proves of little help in the crisis of the film's second half.

This bedroom scene between Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Blondell might have been the stuff of salacious fan fiction had such stuff existed in 1931. Maybe there's an undiscovered Tijuana Bible somewhere that followed up on the suggestion.

Before landing the private gig, Nora spends some time in the hospital maternity ward in one of the movie's oddest scenes. It's odd because nothing really goes on in it apart from Nora swaddling several babies and handing them to their mothers. But it looks like we're supposed to be impressed if not shocked by the fact that it's a racially integrated ward with white, black and Asian mommies awaiting their kids. We see Nora spend much time washing and treating a black baby, and what seems to be lost in translation for 21st century viewers is the sense of transgression the 1931 audience must have felt witnessing such a scene.

Nora starts bending the rules early, staying out late with Maloney and treating a handsome bootlegger (Ben Lyon) for a gunshot wound without reporting the incident to the police. Only later will this prove to have been the right thing to do. Lyon reappears throughout the film, though only at the end do we learn his name. Until then, Nora knows him only as "Bootlegger," despite his attempt to convince her that he's quit the racket. He's lying, of course, but it will turn out that his crime connections will come in handy for Nora.

She ends up as a private night nurse for the two small daughters of Mrs. Ritchey, a blond floozy who's a self-professed "dipsomaniac" and proud of it while suffering from "neurasthenia." She's a monstrously neglectful mother, and her private physician, Dr. Ranger, is doing nothing to make up for her neglect. Nora discovers that he's keeping the little girls on a starvation diet, enforced by Ritchey's chauffeur, Nick (Clark Gable at his most thuggish, perhaps ever). Nick and Dr. Ranger are plotting to starve the girls to death so that their trust-fund will revert to Ritchey, whom Nick plans to marry or otherwise leech from. Ritchey herself is too blotto to care, driving Nora to violence in her frustration.

Stanwyck wreaks havoc at the Ritchey household.

Nora takes her troubles to Dr. Bell, who proves reluctant to interfere with another physician's case, even though Ranger has a dubious reputation despite his extensive clientele. Medical ethics stays Bell's hand. To Nora, ethics are getting in the way of plain humanity. Her bootlegger pal makes possible a shortcut around conventional ethics when he turns out to be Mrs. Ritchey's hooch supplier. Learning of the Ritchey girls' plight from Nora, he uses special methods of persuasion on Bell, threatening offscreen to take him on the proverbial ride if he doesn't intervene. This forces a showdown between Nick and the good guys, and while the chauffeur is good at pushing around women and middle-aged doctors, he knows better than to go against a presumably loaded gun. Nick himself gets taken for a ride, since the law can't be trusted to eliminate him without a trial that could ruin Nora's career, since she would have to violate informal nursing ethics by airing Ritchey's dirty laundry, and that would make her unemployable as a night nurse.

1931 was Clark Gable's breakthrough year over at MGM, but for Night Nurse at Warners he taps into a vein of evil that arguably wasn't ever seen again.

Night Nurse documents a moment of social breakdown, when the old rules seemed not to work anymore and lawlessness might be a viable alternative to injustice. In a way, it expresses the same impulse as the same period's fantasies of leaders with emergency powers to end the Depression or (ironically in the context of Night Nurse) crush crime. But while such films as Gabriel Over the White House fantasized about leaders ruling by decree, Night Nurse portrays the little people bending or dodging rules that got in the way of people's survival. In that way it might have been a more subversive movie than Warner Bros.' more controversial gangster films, since those usually ended with the transgressor getting his comeuppance. Nora may not get to be a night nurse anymore, but she seems pretty well set up regardless as a gangster's moll, whatever Bootlegger Morty may say about reforming.

During her time at Warners, Barbara Stanwyck was probably the studio's closest female equivalent to its tough-guy stars, James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson. Night Nurse brings her quite close to their world, even allowing her to floor a man with one punch. Stanwyck may not be able to match Joan Blondell's hard-boiled attitude, but she radiates a raw power that completely eclipses her sidekick. She's utterly unintimidated by Gable, but she also sells his brute force by taking a hard shove into a door. It's not necessary for her to go toe-to-toe physically with Gable (as she might if Night Nurse were made today) since the moral of the movie requires the "good bad man" bootlegger to do the right thing at the crucial moment. By that point, Stanwyck has more than established her tough-chick credentials.

Night Nurse is one of seventeen movies William Wellman made from 1931 through 1933, mostly at Warner Bros. This one is on the Forbidden Hollywood Collection Vol. 2 box set, while six more Wellmans make up Vol. 3. On the evidence of these films (not to mention The Public Enemy) Wellman was one of the dominant directors of the early Depression years, shooting out films with rat-a-tat frequency and fairly consistent quality. There are still plenty of Wellmans from this little epoch awaiting rediscovery, but Night Nurse stands out as an exemplary pre-Code film as well as a representative Wellman product.